Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when conversation about game design was first bubbling up out of our community of insecure practitioners, a few polarizing topics would arise again and again. You’ll recognize them:

The correct definition of ‘game’

Narrative vs Mechanics

Randomness vs Skill

The importance of realism

Casual vs Hardcore

Many were (and are) merely the irritated observations of game players picking at specific games. However, with a flip of the rhetorical switch, players become designers expressing a universal design truth. Opinions inevitably differ and thus positions harden in the absence of data. And it snowballs from there.

Thankfully, as a developer community, we've grown older. With time and the accumulation of thousands published games, experienced game makers have a lot more insight into how game design actually works. It turns out there’s plenty of room for nuance.

There’s also the growing maturity to ignore false dichotomies and worn out talking points. Honestly, we don’t have time any more. We should be making great games, not arguing ancient design politics.

In the spirit of becoming a forward looking designer, here are my top 5 design debates that I've ignored in 2014.

#1 The correct definition of 'Game'

I've seen a metric ton of definitions for game over the years and have dabbled in crafting them myself. Not a single one has been useful to me in my daily practice of making great games.

Why this discussion is outdated
Games are vast and varied. A single definition tends have one or more of the following issues:

Overly broad: The definition is unable to provide any direction or guidance.

Overly narrow: The definition eliminates useful tools and influences from other areas of systems, thought or art.

Overly convoluted: The definition is only useful to lawyers who care primarily about edge cases and not about getting things done.

Alternative discussions to have instead
I focus on finding and exploring useful design tools. I don’t need to care about the definition of ‘woodworking’ in order to be damned happy that hammers and nails exist. The same goes for games. I focus on scaffolding. And loot drop tables. And internal economies.

A useful goal is to find general tools that a smart designer can use to radically improve their work. Like any tool, they should to be applied in the proper context. So they are rarely universal or one-size fits all. And like a craft tool, they need to be applied with skill. They aren’t a pattern that you toss at a problem and get a fixed result.

#2 Narrative vs mechanics

Science was once plagued by the idea that certain behavior derived entirely from genetics (nature) or entirely from environmental effects (nurture). This turned out to be a naive simplification of a vastly most intricate and interrelated system genetic predispositions, environmental triggers and feedback loops.

Narrative and mechanics have proven to be similarly intertwined.

Why this discussion is outdated
In the end, the human brain has neither a pure systemic understanding the world. Nor does it have a purely narrative understanding of the world. Memory, learning, emotional triggers, cause and effect all feed into how our brain adapts to environmental mechanics and then flow out again as a social response.

So the model suggested by the supposed conflict is simply broken. There is no ‘versus’.

There are many explanations for how this argument even arose. My favorite: A cocky tribe from old linear media clashed with an isolated tribe of game makers. They fought a stupid fight about authority and status that had almost nothing to do with making games. Meh.

Alternative discussions to have instead
A modern discussion could include:

What existing schemas are activated by my game?

How should we implement learning and scaffolding structures?

What is the impact of various forms of stimuli within game loops?

How should we tighten or loosen our systems of cause and effect?

What are systems of pacing?

What social role does narrative serve? How can we engineer human systems to encourage it?

Theories like Interaction Loops or Emotion Engineering integrate narrative and mechanics. In the process of banging our heads against building great interactive experiences, we've been forced to break down ‘narrative’ and ‘mechanics’ into atomic chunks and see how they fit in practice. Let’s discuss the rich synthesis of story, world building and mechanical techniques that thrives in interactive systems.

#3 Randomness vs Skill

There’s been a sad resurgence of this 80’s wargamer rant. Randomness is obsessively derided as less masterful or strategic relative to pure skill games.

Why this discussion is outdated
Randomness is just another design tool. Used with skill, it yields some amazing games.

Random systems are rife with mastery. ‘Randomness’ can provide strong elements of mastery, in terms of learning distributions, managing options and adapting to new situations.

Games involve loops. Random outputs almost never occurs in isolation, but are part of an internal game economy. Randomness is often an essential tool for creating strategic variation and context.

There are different, equally valid playstyles. Not everyone is a rigidly intellectual young man who desires only mental-skill games that let them dominate others. Some play to relax, some to socialize, some for physical mastery, some to feel part of a shared purpose. Randomness can be a beneficial tool when designing for these players.

What are other noise generators? Complexity noise, social noise, feedback noise, etc.

How do we make people better through play?

Recommendation: Practice using randomness where appropriate. Explore the space. Make a game with randomness that is about mastery. If you happen to be someone that values intellectual rigor over chance, make a game for someone other than yourself. Stretch your humanity.

#4 Realism

Past futurists sold a vision where games must inevitably become indistinguishable from reality. We marketed the hell out of that vision to the point it became dogma. You bought a new console, a new video card, a new computer to creep ever closer to the dream. You argued for 1080p as a paladin fighting for the glorious Holodeckian cause.

Why this discussion is outdated
Realism in graphics or simulations no longer is a dominant goal for most game developers. In practice, it turned out it wasn't really an essential feature for a successful games. In our far future era, you can snub realism and still make a billion dollars with a game like Minecraft or Puzzle & Dragons.

Realism has niche appeal. It is an aesthetic choice that tends to appeal to a singular sub-culture that we've trained with our decades of marketing. Cartoons, text and other stylized forms of representation are also appealing.

Realism can be an unnecessary expense. We sometimes wholesale replicate reality when we don’t know what specific stimuli actually appeals to players. It is sort of a shotgun approach that wastes vast amount of effort to hopefully make something interesting. A substantial portion of the exponential escalating cost of game development can be attributed directly to the pursuit of realism.

Simulation adds design risk: Many simulations are complex and difficult to manipulate. They also are not inherently emotionally satisfying. Insisting on mechanical realism while simultaneously trying to make a fun game tends to yield failed game designs.

Games are also endogenous systems of value. They are like little self contained baubles of math that set up interesting internal relationships. A game like Tetris has immensely value independent of references to the real world.

When players ask for realism, they often aren't asking for realism. The desire for realism is often best understood in terms of how players learn and apply existing mental schema to new system. A request for realism could be: A new player asking for a metaphor that helps them understand an abstract system. Or it could be an advanced player pointing out unnecessary edge cases. Both these have solutions outside belabored realism.

Alternative discussions to have instead

What is the right art style for your audience?

What are the trade offs between art style, production concerns and budget?

What sort of math or systems are interesting independent of their appearance in the real world?

How do we make game-like, cartoon-like, info rich, surreal virtual reality games?

Recommendation: Ask what utilitarian feedback your game truly needs. Invest your art resources making those elements amazing. Ask what level of modeling a system needs to create rich gameplay. Invest your design resources to create a tiny rule set with deep emergence. Be smart. Be frugal. When someone demands realism, try to figure out what they really want.

#5 Casual vs Hardcore

There’s a set of cultural stereotypes that casual players act one way while hardcore players act another. A surprising number of design decisions are made based off these stereotypes.

Why this discussion is outdated
The casual and hardcore stereotypes suffer from the problems typical of stereotypes. They are gross simplifications that yield the incorrect design decisions.

Many of the stereotypes are simply wrong: The longest average playtimes? Not console or PC. Handheld games, particularly those ‘kiddy’ Nintendo titles dominate session length. Regular daily play happens more often on smartphones and tablets than it does on consoles. When I look at data, there are very few ‘casual’ or ‘hardcore’ stereotypes that hold true. And when they do there are massive exceptions.

The variation within a specific game is huge: You've got a half dozen or more distinct playstyles within almost any game of reasonable complexity. Each game is a vast city with many different people living within it. Mere averages tell you very little about how to improve the state of your game.

The market is shifting: Service-based games are driving for improved retention by doubling down on play. Women are playing more. Console owners are aging and slowing down. A lot of the old lessons about demographics and play styles have shifted. And they’ll continue to change in the future.

I see ‘casual’ or ‘hardcore’ as poisoned tribal labels like ‘gamer’ or ‘skinner box’. Mostly they are just weaponized stereotypes, deployed to enforce perceived group boundaries. They have little productive place in a modern design (or marketing) discussion.

Alternative discussions to have instead

How do you break out of thinking in cheap stereotypes in order to gain an advantage over the dinosaurs that don't see the market has it truly exists?

How do different groups unique to your game behave? (Hint: We can get the data!)

What motivates the groups unique to your game?

How do you include diverse hooks to appeal to multiple passionate audiences?

How do you make a targeted niche game using iteration with a live community?

I personally tend to make games that look 'casual', but consistently melt the brains of self identified 'hardcore' players trained on endless tutorials, cut scenes and QTEs. Some of the best players are smart 30-40-year old women that have the intense mental stamina for activities like logic, planning and creative thinking. They thrive on hard games. My market doesn't even exist if you see the world through a 'casual / hardcore' lens. Yet there it is, merrily enjoying games amidst the vast diversity of this planet's billion odd players.

Recommendation
No one really makes 'hardcore' or 'casual' games. At best, we use existing markets, tribes and distribution channels to get a tentative foothold in a player’s psyche. But then it gets complicated. Embrace the complexity of your players. Learn who they actually are. Create elegant solutions that serve your many types of players.

Thoughts for 2015

If you happen to find yourself facing these 5 topics: Turn away. Our creative lives are limited. Pour your time into something productive.

Academics that expound on these ideas: Stop naive theory crafting and start referencing nuanced data from working designers.

Students that gnaw at these bones: Arguing ancient talking points in comment sections gets you nowhere in life. Make games instead. Base your design conversations around your hands-on experiments. You'll learn more, faster.

Goodness knows that conversations on dead design ideas will not end. Players and their innumerable derivatives (fan press, forum warriors, cultural critics, etc) continue talking about these topics. Some talk for entertainment. Some for status. Some for business. Some talk about their game experiences in order to process them mentally and emotionally. For many of these purposes, simplistic polarizing hooks are more enticing than deep comprehension.

So these inane design views become practically tradition, or at least common hazing rituals. Like yelling at televised football games. Or laughing at trucknuts. Sure, players aren't having a productive craft conversation, but they shouldn't be judged by the same rubric. Consider their chatter a cultural performance.

As for designers, you have a different role to fill. Recognize when you are accidentally acting like a uninformed player or student. Instead of getting caught up in the babble of ill-informed internet backwash, try talking directly with other working designers. Build tools and knowledge together.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Many games have loot. Usually this drops randomly. Loot drops are a pretty mundane topic, but one that almost every designer runs into at some point. Here are some best practices I've encountered over the years. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to these tips and tricks.

Your basic loot table

The goal is to drop some set of items at a given probability. Let’s say when you defeat an enemy, you have a chance of getting shield, a rare sword or nothing at all.

So what does this look like to the player? We've got a 10% chance of dropping a sword, a 40% chance of dropping a shield and a 50% chance of getting nothing.

As the designer, I could go in and change Null's weight to 100 and now I've got a 6.6% (10/150) chance of dropping a sword, a 26% (40/150) chance off dropping a shield and a 66% (100/150) chance of dropping nothing.

Mapping onto other common random systems

This system is a simple restating of many other familiar methods of randomness. It is a fun superpower to train your designer brain to be able to switch between understanding any randomness issue in terms of loot tables, cards or dice.

Cards
Imagine deck of cards that you can shuffle and draw from.

Each type of card in the deck is an item.

The number of cards of a given type is that item’s weight

Shuffling the deck is equivalent to assigning each item to a range and generating a random number.

Drawing a card is the equivalent of selecting the item that drops.

Now a normal deck of cards has 52 cards, but with loot tables, you don’t need to operate with that constraint. Your decks could have 1000's of cards and a vast array of types. Or they could have tiny decks that are the equivalent of a typical poker hand.

Dice
Dice also map onto loot tables.

Each individual die is a loot table.

The sides (1-N) are items (labeled 1 through N)

Each side gets a weight of ‘1’. (Unless you are using weighted dice!)

Multiple dice can be represented as rolling the same loot table multiple times. So 2D6 is the equivalent of sampling a 6 item loot table twice.

Variations

Now that we’ve defined a basic loot table, what else can we do with it?

Variation: Items sets
You can also drops sets of loot. An item doesn’t need to be a single thing. For example, I could extend it so that the players gets a shield and a health potion if that option is selected.

Variation: Always drop
A common need is to flag an item so it always drops. One convention is that items with weight '-1' always drop.Variation: Repeatable randomness
Sometimes you want to be able to repeat a random roll. For example, when a player saves a game and then is able to reload to avoid a bad loot drop, it can lead to very grindy player behavior. If there is an exploit that ruins the game for them, most will happily go for it.

Most contemporary pseudo random number generators use a seed value. As long as you can save that seed value, you can run the random number generator again and get the same result.

Variation: Rolling without replacement
The problem with the system above is that players may, through chance alone, always roll 'null'. This is a common complaint by players. “I played that encounter 3000 times and never got the MegaGoldenLootGun!” This can happen.

In statistics, there are two fundamental types of sampling:

Sampling with replacement: You pull the numbers out of the bucket and then after you've recorded what you got, you put them back in. So you have the same chance of getting the same thing again in the next draw.

Sampling without replacement: You pull the item out of the bucket and once you’ve recorded it, you set it aside. You have a lower chance of getting that item again and thus a higher chance of getting the remaining items.

Tetris uses sampling without replacement. Each set of Tetris pieces is in a loot table. Every time you get a specific piece, it is removed from the bucket. That way they guarantee that you’ll always get a long piece if you wait long enough.

Here’s how you implement rolling without replacement in a loot table.

When you roll an item, reduce its weight by 1. This shorten its range by 1 and shortens the max range by 1 as well.

Keep the player's modified loot table around for the next time you roll.

Variation: Guaranteeing specific drops
Sometimes even rolling without replacement isn’t fast enough and you want to guarantee a loot drop. Blizzard does this for certain rare drops so that players don’t grind for very long times.

You could just increase the weight, but a low chance of getting something with a guarantee can feel very different over multiple plays than a slowly increasing chance of getting an item.

Here’s how you implement guaranteed loot drops.

When you roll any non-guaranteed item, reduce all non-guaranteed items weight by X%

X = 100 / Max number of rolls you before the guaranteed items drop.

Keep the player's modified loot table around for the next time you roll.

Example

Suppose you want the sword to always drop after 5 turns even though it it only has a 10% chance of dropping.

So X = 100 / 5 or 20%.

So every time you don’t roll the Sword, the weight for the Shield drops 8 (40*0.2) and the weight for null drops 10 (50*0.2)

After 5 turns, the weight for all the other items will be 0 and the sword will have a 100% chance of dropping.

Variation: Hierarchical loot tables
Loot tables are generally source for new resources. However, you can easily run into situations where you are dropping too much or too little of a particular resource. Some sort of constraints would be helpful.

One solution is to use hierarchical loot tables without replacement. When a particular resource runs out, the player doesn’t get any more. We’ve used this for our daily coin awards. We want to give out 100 coins a day, but no more. But we want to do it as part of the loot system.

Create two tables: Rewards and DailyCoins.

Have the main loot table reference the Daily Coins bucket.

When Daily Coins get picked, roll that table and see how many coins you get.

In the example above, a player has a 40% chance of getting coins. Then we roll the dailyCoins table and see that they can win a maximum of 100 coins a day with 10 awards of 1 coins, 4 awards of 10 coins and 1 award of 50 coins.

When the dailyCoins loot table is emptied, they’ll get nothing until it refreshes after a day.

Variation: Conditional drops
Sometimes you want to test if you should drop the items base off some external variable. In Realm of the Mad God, we wanted to avoid free riders getting loot for a boss kill without doing at least some damage. So in the loot table, we added a check. If a valuable item in the loot table was rolled, then we'd check to see if the player had done more than X% of damage to the enemy.

You could also build in switches for which loot it valid based off player level or even enemy level. I tend to instead use multiple smaller loot tables, but the system is flexible enough that you can easily architect your data with a few large tables and use of conditionals.

Variation: Modifiers
You can also modify the quantity or weight of a drop based off some external logic. For example, a player with a skill in harvesting could yield 2x as many of a particular item drop compared to a player without that skill. Or you could modify the weight. A high level character might have a -50% weight for all items marked lower than their level. (Thanks to a Reddit commenter for this idea)

Other uses

Drop tables are commonly used for dropping loot. But I also find them useful in other areas.

Procedural generation: Use a table to build weapons or characters from components

AI: Use a table to select behaviors such as attacks or moves.

This may seem a little silly..surely there are better ways to model AI! However, one way to think about randomness is that it is a very rough first order model of any system. How does the human brain model a system? We make an observation about a system. We note the frequencies and tendencies for those observations to reoccur. It is only much, much later that we start to understand ‘why’ something happens or the causal relationship between parts.

In physics, we often joke that in order to model a cow, a complex biological organism, the first step is to ‘imagine a spherical cow’. By creating a simplistic, easy to work with model, we can often generate useful insights at a very low cost.

Many times, a drop table is a ‘good enough’ human-centric approximation of a complex system. For many systems, most players will never move beyond a basic probabilistic understanding so modeling more complexity is a waste of time. Efficient game design is an exercise in modeling elements only to the minimum level necessary to create the desired experience.

Consider: D&D modeled entire universes with what were essentially loot drop tables. That was a deliberate focus on minimizing systems that were in many ways just secondary flavoring to the core roleplaying.

A loot drop table isn’t the only tool you need, but in many scenarios, it is good enough.

Procedural generation thought experiment

Here’s a simple procedural generation system using drop tables. There are lots of other ways to do this, but this is more to get your brain thinking.

Let’s say you want to build a procedurally generated enemy

Start by making a list of unique enemy parts. Maybe your enemy is made up of a type of movement, a type of attack, a defensive buff and a type of treasure.

Make loot tables for each one of those parts.

For each item in the loot table, give it a power value based off how powerful you think it might be. for example, a knife attack might be weak so it only has a power of 5. But a large hammer attack might have a power of 15.

Create another loot table of buffs. These are modifiers to various attributes. For example, ‘Strong’ boost a value on an attack by 20%. You can have debuffs as well ‘Weak’ might diminish a value by -50%. These have reduce the power value of a part.

Now let’s generate an enemy

Set a target: Set a target power for your generated enemy. Say you want an enemy of power 40

Roll: Roll each of the parts once and add them into a list.

Score: Add up all the power values to get a score.

Adjust: If the sum of the parts is over the target, add a debuff or roll for a lower power part. If it is under, add a buff or roll for a higher power part.

Repeat: Repeat this process until you hit a desired error threshold (distance from power 40) or you've exhausted the number of iterations you are willing to spend.

You now have a procedurally generated enemy. There are tons of tweaks you can do to this basic system, but it works most of the time. As an exercise, think about:

Exclusion lists: If two parts are picked that are on the list, throw the enemy away and reroll.

Multiple constraints: Parts are scored on multiple criteria. Note, the more constraints you add, the less likely you are to converge on a viable result.

Conclusion

Any time there’s a discussion of randomness, there’s a huge number of secondary issues that come into play. I recommend the following for further reading:

Resist being dogmatic about randomness. Be a broadly educated designer whose aesthetic choices are based on hands on experimentation. A good rule of thumb is that you can't intelligently critique a design tool until you've made a couple games that use it successfully.

Anyway, this is just how I've done loot tables; a mundane part of any working designer's life. I'm curious if other folks have other ways of managing loot (and randomness) that they love and live by.

(And before I forget – I've recently freed up some time to do some games consulting. Ping me if you need help with your games!)

Sunday, May 25, 2014

We often consider artistic works from a creative or cultural perspective, but I find it just as enlightening to examine them from an economic or evolutionary lens. How does the economic environment within which a developer finds themselves shape the form that art takes?

As a case study of this in practice, I’ve been fascinated by a class of content-focused game that’s recently found a stable niche in the maturing mobile, PC and console markets. In mobile, we see examples like Sword & Sworcery, Device 6 or Monument Valley. In PC, you've got Kentucky Route Zero, Proteus and Gone Home. On console the trend is less pronounced, though Journey and Flower share some aspects.

These games generally have the following characteristics

Strong focus on evocative content: Most of the game is composed of arcs that deliver heavily authored payloads. The player’s cognitive load is consumed by interpretation of stimuli not the planning or execution of actions.

Light use of systems: Mechanically, the games tend to have limited interactive loops. There is little room for play within a mechanical space. The systems used are often highly traditional with a long history within other genres.

Short playtime: Often 1-3 hours.

This form thrives not due to some sudden explosion of artistic appreciation within the human race, nor due to universally-applicable intrinsic attributes of Truth and Beauty. No, instead these games thrive because they competently execute a development strategy that matches well with the current socioeconomic environment.

Form shaped by environment risk

Form is an accepted and standardized structure for a work of art. A painting stretched on canvas painted in oils that fits roughly on a living room wall is a common form of painting. A haiku is a form of writing.

Unlike many media, the forms that a game might take are still quite fluid. Where authors of literature might feel locked into to well-established structures such as poem, short story, essay or novel, game forms are both broader and have less sharp boundaries. They vary radically in mechanics, scope, topic, number of participants, and hardware. The difference between a game of Tetris and a game of Charades can seem far vaster than that of a Shakespearean play and an encyclopedia entry. And as a designer, you often get to chose the unique form of your game.

How risks shape game forms

However, different forms of game have different levels of risk and trade offs. There’s internal risk such as design risk, technical risk, production risk. And then there's external risk such as distribution risk, market fit and many others. If any one of these aspect of the project fails, the development investment is lost. Any game design can be judged by the costs associated with building the game, the benefits of success and the downsides to failure.

Fig 1. Valid terrain based off existing environmental risks

These are not abstract decisions. Most developers (even large ones) operate a paycheck or two away from bankruptcy. Paying the rent and putting food on the table are very real concerns. Many smart teams therefore choose projects of a form that minimize overall risk in order to dramatically increase their chances of future survival.

Thus game developers have a great incentive to evolve game forms to fit whatever environmental pressures are present. If something changes in the environment that increases a type of risk, then you’ll see developers selecting, from this vast palette of potential forms, the options that mitigate that risk. Picture a thousand little Brownian developers blindly adapting their game forms to half felt market forces and thus converging on useful strategies.

Using survivors to determine dominant strategies

The process of evolving games forms can feel invisible. The vast majority of projects that don’t balance their risks correctly, fail and sink out of the cultural consciousness. Most creators are barely conscious of their influences and constraints. All we really know are the the survivors.

When you see a new species of game thriving in the marketplace, you can start to ask some interesting questions. What are the culling mechanisms that let those games survive? What strategy was used that gave them an advantage over other possible designs? The things that make it through the filter give you some insight into the shape of the filter.

Some forces at play

What are some meaningful forces acting upon the modern indie developer attempt to sell a game for a fixed upfront price?

Digital distribution and cheap tools: At the heart of the emergence is ability for small teams to build and release games at low cost. However, those markets are now maturing.

A large audience trained on content consumption: The past decade of AAA titles perfected a variety of secondary content delivery standards via cutscenes, level design, voiceovers, etc. Gamers know and understand these methods. Over the decades, we've built up the equivalent of a trained audience that knows how to read.

Average revenue for a product is dropping. In fact they are close to zero in mobile markets. The exponential distribution of revenue looks more L-shaped, with small number of titles making the majority of the money and no middle market to speak of. You have hits or failures with little in-between.

Price per unit for games with an upfront cost is less than $0.99. As Steam opens up further, bundles proliferate and consoles introduce more free games, expect further price erosion for premium titles. You need to reach more people to make less money.

Discoverability is weak. Discovery mechanisms are weak and heavily gated. Channels are also flooded with games of difficult to determine quality. A game benefits from being able signal quality 1 to 30 seconds of exposure since that is likely all the time it will get.

Cost of production is increasing: Cheap tools bring the capital cost down, but labor costs remain stable. The need to hit ever increasing levels of quality results in an escalating cost curve. Five years ago, a hit premium game on mobile might cost $50,000 to build (including sweat equity). Now, for less revenue, you’ll see costs range from $200k - 1M (or higher). This expense is almost entirely due to content and feature competition: more art, more animation, increased use of 3D, more ‘required’ features.

So it is hard to stand out, hard to make money and very easy to spend more than you make.

A content-focused strategy

Given such a landscape, what is a species of game that might survive? We are looking for solutions to the problems listed, but also ways of tackling multiple problems with the same resources. Efficient solutions survive.

Fig 2. A strategy that mitigates technical and design risk.While taking on some distribution risk.

Note that the following is by no means the only strategy. If you look around at other thriving developers, there are many alternatives. Nor is it a preferred one. This strategy has no inherent value beyond its functional benefits. Nor for that matter is it likely that the half-blind creators explicitly planned out their strategy. Like the flying fish and the (sadly extinct) flying shark, common strategies converge unwittingly from disparate perspectives as if shaped by an invisible hand. Environments have local maxima whether or not we are smart enough to perceive them ahead of time.

With those disclaimers duly dispensed, consider a content-focused development strategy for small teams...Reduce costs

Target a smaller scope: Content is expensive, but what if you make a game that is 1 to 3 hours, not 20 or 30? This simple change means you can cost 1/10th what a bigger title might. This is the defining economic attribute of this game form.

Remove systems and features: Trim as many standard elements as possible and focus the game focus on one or two key features. Dear Esther, you walk around. In Gone Home, you walk around and click on objects. NPCs? Cut. Combat? Cut. Branching narratives? Cut.

Keep your team small. Since labor is your largest cost, a small team means lower investment. Team members should being able to execute multiple aspects of development so you don’t need part time specialists.

Excel at what you attempt: It helps to have at least one or more people who are world class. Then build your game around their signature style. This makes up for some of the inevitable weaknesses that arise from small teams sizes, wearing too many hats and short schedules.

Reduce distribution risk

Make high impact video and images. Since you have limited contact with potential players, you want the briefest glimpse of a game to excite them. Gorgeous visuals, evocative narrative hooks that can be grasped in a couple seconds work well. All many buyers need to see of Monument Valley is a single screenshot.

Form relationships to amplify your signal for free: With a small team and a low marketing budget, free distribution is ideal. By forming relationships with journalists, streamers, taste makers and platform curators, you may get a mention or a feature. Of course, what you provide in return is a sellable story or validation of their long simmering world view. ‘Games as art’ is currently easy topic to bond over and all games with this form make the most of it.

Reduce design and production risk

Rely heavily on static content: Art and video rarely fails on a functional level. There’s a risk in discovering an artist initially, but once on board, a competent artist tends to continue to produce competent art. Especially over short production schedules. You already need to make high impact visuals in order to get distribution, so there’s synergy here.

Use existing mechanics: New mechanics take time to discover and often don’t work out. Invention is hard. By using well proven traditional mechanics, it is unlikely that the systems will delay your game. Turning a page or clicking a hyper-link is quite reliable.

Use existing technology: Well proven, simplistic technology. Again, you can get away something that simply puts quality content on the screen

Avoid complex technologies: Technology that require strong expertise such as multiplayer servers or advanced 3D rendering is likely to blow up. So don’t do that.

Reduce audience risk

Make the game easy to finish: You want people to play the game, finish it and then talk to their friends while still in midst of the afterglow. This is a fast virus, not a slow one. Challenge is a useful tactic in other contexts (Dark Souls, Spelunky), but it is a poor fit when you want to deliver your beautiful load of content as smoothly as possible.

Keep content highly interpretable: To offset the risk of the game being too short, you can implement content that either vague or open to many interpretations. This means that quality of your content can be lower without anyone being able to concretely describe it as such. A certain air of mysterious brilliance can act as a prophylactic against common criticisms; seed the doubt that a player may simply be unschooled in Imperial fashion.

Engage the community: Ideally, you kick off a secondary wave of community engagement as players and critics invent their own detailed explanations for what may in fact be random (yet highly evocative) noise.

Notice how all these pieces fit together into a coherent strategy. A small team with a strong artist and / or writer makes a short, attractive game that sells a light narrative. This also happens to be small enough a scope that they can finish and release it. Such a game is pretty enough to be featured and can be easily talked about. There’s also little risk for the player...they get this nice watchable nugget of content that’s super cheap and feels like a reasonable value relative to other comparable consumables like books or movies.

A deeply conservative take on games

This strategy formula isn't new in the grand scheme. Cheap, consumable content differentiated on gatekeeper-approved quality variables is at the heart of most media markets.

In grand spectrum of possible games, the crop of boutique content games is one of the most conservative possible development strategies. Rosy cheeked media critics who might imagine the real history of games started in 2007 are likely excited by such titles. However, when compared to the rich systemic and narrative experimentation of the last 30 years, these forms are ultimately a retreat; survivalist risk mitigation marketed as hip cultural advancement. Such games tacitly give up on the idea that games could be a different type of thing than traditional media and adopt whole hog similar methods and limitations. At the crudest level, you flip pages, you see content.

One should tread lightly in labeling this as a ‘bad’ change. Evolution does not judge. This strategy works. Good, passionate people are making money and surviving to build another game. That’s all you can really hope for as a game developer in a staunchly capitalist world.

The future

Since we are dealing with a conservative product strategy, comparable markets suggest where these might evolve over the next 5 years.

Fig 3. Increasing costs put new pressure on the content heavy form.

Player desire for the new form increases the overall market opportunity.

Rapid market saturation: Since costs of entry in terms of skills and technology are quite low and first movers have almost zero competitive moats, new entrants should flood the market. This reduces the average success rate; most will not be profitable.

Costs increase: As more entries appear, quality becomes more important. Those with cash spend more to keep or capture profitable audiences. Form-specific blockbusters emerge that spend the maximum amount to get the maximum audience. (I've called these genre kings in the past).

Shorter length: Increased costs put pressure on decreasing the length even further. At some point players may decide that even an amazing 20 minutes is not worth 99 cents.

Use of portfolios: Anthologies, bundles or subscriptions to content streams (aka magazines) are common methods of paying a population of authors in a hit driven ecosystem. If this shift in market structure occurs, middlemen begin dictating tastes even more strongly.

Attempted differentiation based off thematic genre: Essentially the market fragments. As customers become trained in this new form, they’ll start to prefer specific types of content, much like we we see romance or mystery novels. First movers in thematic areas could tap a new sub-niche.

Fragile specialist firms: Developers will need to specialize in this specific form to produce the best of breed content. However, this makes them inflexible when the need arises to adapt to new forms. We've seen this situation play out in the past with adventure games.

It may seem silly to predict a future of saturation and collapse when there are so few of these games around. Yet markets are never eternal. Due to the lack of competitive moats, this one will mature rapidly and any golden period is likely to be short.

Fig 5. Fragmentation into sub-forms due the changing landscape

In some sense, these short content focused games have made a deal with the devil. They've reduced their inventive mechanical scope and deliver all their value through highly polished content. However, one constant of the game industry is that content costs are always rising on a given platform. The cost curve is the monster that eats our industry. It is great to trim 1/10th of the content in a game to get your costs down, but what happens when the cost of making content then jumps by 10X? That brief advantage disappears.

Lessons

Though I don't personally make short content-driven games, I find this lens immensely useful in understanding how and why my work impacts the world. All art is shaped by the economics of a specific time and place. All standardized forms of art are but niches within a socioeconomic ecosystem. They are not eternal, they shift over time. Knowing that common forms are not some absolute truth empowers the clever and observant developer.

It pays to ask: Who is making money? How do the developers, journalists, museums, critics or other middlemen benefit from promoting the works that they promote? Any creative work that depends on money-making institutions (big or small) is a commercial artifact, shaped by commercial constraints. None of us are truly independent creative entities. That’s at best a pleasant illusion, a lie. We all create within systems that cull our impassioned work with pragmatic brutality. We also, like it or not, preempt this culling through self-censorship.

The flip side of this analysis is to look at the failures. Ask who is doing something different and failing? What structural and environmental factors explain why they are not making enough to eat? Once you've identified the problem areas, is it possible to spot gaps and come up with a new strategy that lets you thrive?

When you see a new form of game emerging, ask why. Seek to understand the confluence of forces. Then use this rich understanding to invent your own unique form of game. Do your part to ensure that the evolution of games never stagnates.

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About Me

I've been a game designer, pixel artist, toolmaker, physicist and MBA. My first job in college was on a game called Tyrian at a tiny company called Epic Megagames. These days, I'm the Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox.